Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 116
February 18, 2025
Russian, US teams meet in Riyadh, hold ‘serious conversation on all issues’
RIYADH, February 18. /TASS/. Following years of no communication, Russian and American delegations held a meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The sides discussed rebuilding relations, preparations for a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, as well as prospects for resolving the conflict in Ukraine.
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TASS has put together the highlights from the talks.
About the venueThe Russian-US talks began around 7:30 a.m. GMT in one of the palaces of the royal family: Diriyah in the Albasateen complex. The meeting lasted 4 1/2 hours.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Saudi Arabia was chosen as the venue for the talks because it suits both sides.
Members of the delegationsRussia was represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov and Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff comprised the US team.
Subjects of the talksThe sides discussed rebuilding the entirety of Russia-US relations, preparations for a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and possible negotiations on a settlement in Ukraine.
Statements by RussiaUshakov said that the delegations had a “very serious conversation on all issues.” However, it is still hard to say that the positions of Russia and the US are getting closer, according to the official. He also said Russia and the US agreed to “take into account each other’s interests.” According to the aide, a date for a meeting between Putin and Trump hasn’t been set and it is unlikely that it will take place next week. He said it is not yet clear who would be appointed as negotiators on Ukrainian settlement, as the president has yet to make a decision.
Dmitriev said following the talks that the Russian and US teams treated each other with respect, as equals.
“It is too early to talk about compromises. We can say that the sides started communicating with each other, started listening to each other, started the dialog,” he said.
According to Dmitriev, the countries also discussed potential economic cooperation and energy prices.
Statements by the USRubio and Lavrov agreed to appoint respective high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible, State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement. They also agreed to establish a consultation mechanism to address irritants to the bilateral relationship and lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and economic and investment opportunities.
“One phone call followed by one meeting is not sufficient to establish enduring peace,” she said separately.
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Egypt’s Military Continues Preparation for War Against Israel
Egyptian soldiers participate in field training at Mohamed Naguib Military Base, Egypt, Sept. 15, 2017.The Egyptian military is continuing preparations for waging war, although Cairo has not announced an intended target.
The Egyptian paratrooper brigade recently conducted training exercises, jumping out of aircraft and using powered gliders – the same type of gliders used to invade Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, according to open source intelligence.
Egypt is reportedly furious over the publication of a hypothetical Israeli scenario created by artificial intelligence involving an attack on the Aswan Dam.
“The Nziv website, which focuses on military analysis, described a scenario in which bunker-penetrating missiles and advanced weaponry could be used to demolish or partially collapse the High Dam, leading to catastrophic flooding. It claimed that within minutes, millions of cubic meters of water would surge down the Nile Valley, flooding areas such as Luxor and Aswan and destroying infrastructure,” according to a report published Sunday by The New Arab.
Such an attack could wipe out military bases and industrial facilities, flooding vast areas and killing thousands in the first few hours, according to the report.
In response, Egyptian military researcher Sa’ad al-Faqi, told the Arabic edition of the Russian RT news outlet that Egypt would strike Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona “within minutes” of any attack on the Aswan Dam.
Beneath this all this verbal media skirmishing, however, lie very real Egyptian military preparations for another war with the Jewish State.
Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, warned recently that Egypt has established military bases in Sinai for potential offensive actions. The Israeli ambassador emphasized that the move is an absolute violation of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty signed on March 26, 1979.
Satellite images have also revealed 100 Abrams tanks – Egypt’s premier battle tanks — parked near Israel’s border with Egypt – another violation of the peace treaty, which stipulates that most of Sinai must remain demilitarized.
Three new airfields have been built in Sinai and massive tunnels have been dug – more violations of the treaty.
The peace agreement allows for military camps for 47 battalions; currently there are camps for 180 battalions, four times the permitted amount, according to Lt. Col. (res.) Eliyahu Dekel, a military analyst who has tracked adherence to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty for decades.
An analysis of the military buildup and the development of the infrastructure systems in the Sinai and the Canal front, leads [Dekel] to the conclusion that the Egyptian Army’s focus is on preparing a theatre of war against Israel in Sinai, Dekel warns.
Last Tuesday, Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Mageed Ahmed Abdel Mageed Saqr ordered military brigades in the Sinai and near Rafah – which straddles the border between Egypt and Gaza – to maintain the “highest level of readiness for war.”
Proclaiming an elevated alert and ordering military exercises, however, is not new for Cairo. Egypt carried out similar activities shortly after the start of the October 7, 2023 war launched by Hamas against Israel, and again in the summer of 2024. Such posturing is often a way for the Cairo government to show its citizens it is defending the homeland against the “Zionist state.”
Nevertheless, Egypt may indeed be preparing its armed forces for a surprise attack on Israel, despite a decades-long peace treaty.
“For example, in May of this year, Egypt signed a contract to buy 30 advanced French Rafale fighters. It is meant to improve Egypt’s chances if it has to fight the powerful Israeli Air Force,” Israeli national security expert Ehud Eilam wrote in a commentary for Israel Defense.
Egypt spent years preparing for the Yom Kippur War, preceded by myriad official speeches laced with apparent bluster and bravado.
The reasons for another, possible attempt at annihilating the State of Israel are complex: They include internal and regional Arab political maneuvering, fear of being forced to accept an influx of hundreds of thousands of Gazan emigrants under the Trump Plan for Gaza, complete with thousands of terrorists among them, and the deterioration of a longtime cold peace with Israel.
One week ago, the Egyptian foreign ministry announced an emergency Arab summit to be held on Feb. 27 in response to Trump’s plan for Gaza, which would enable its residents to emigrate from the enclave to nations abroad.
Trump announced a plan to rebuild Gaza into what he called the “Riviera of the Middle East” while enabling Gazans to find a better, easier life elsewhere. The president suggested that Egypt and Jordan would provide land to resettle Gazans into new homes – but both countries swiftly rejected the plan outright.
“Over the past few days, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty made a series of phone calls with several Arab counterparts to mass regional efforts in a bid to thwart the US proposal of displacing the Palestinian people,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi canceled a planned official visit to the White House in response to Trump’s announced plan for Gaza.
Jordanian King Abdullah II, who did not cancel his own recent visit to Washington, expressed his views on the matter in diplomatic language during his meeting with Trump and a subsequent presser with media.
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How a US Color Revolution Broke Up Yugoslavia
Blind Injustice
RT (2024)
Film Review
This documentary traces the genocidal war the Clinton administration launched against Bosnian Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and the role of the International Criminal Court in imprisoning Serbian leaders who spoke out against US aggression.
Clinton’s 1995 “humanitarian intervention” in the former Yugoslavia turned out to be a dress rehearsal for their 2014 intervention in Ukraine. There was even a Maidan-style color revolution in Bosnia in 1992, instigated by pro-NATO snipers firing on a crowd of peaceful protesters, bringing the pro-Western Islamist Alija Izetbegović to power. This was followed by two false flag explosions in the Sarajevo market in 1993 and 1994, which NATO falsely blamed on the Serbs.
Clinton’s main goal in 1995 was to use ethnic division to sever Yugoslavia’s ethnic ties with Russia, to carve it up into smaller more malleable political entities and to install pro-Western demagogues to rule them. Patriots who fought to preserve Yugoslavian unity were labeled as “war criminals,” particularly if they were Serbian.
Mass killings committed by non-Serbs were rarely prosecuted. Serbians convicted of war crimes were convicted of “criminal conspiracy” or “collective guilt” because there was scant concrete evidence linking them to specific massacres. Evidence presented at the International Criminal Court often consisted of forged documents, hearsay evidence or coerced false testimony.
No NATO leaders were prosecuted for their war crimes (eg the bombing of Belgrade).
In total one hundred Serbs were convicted of war crimes, with eight receiving life sentences. Most Croats and Muslims implicated in genocide were released after the first or second stage of trial. Those who were convicted usually received symbolic sentences, such as fines. In her book, former ICC prosecutor Carla del Ponte writes about political pressure not to prosecute non-Serbs for war crimes and describes a scheme to kill Serbs to sell their organs.
The West’s “humanitarian intervention” culminated in the October 2000 Bulldozer Revolution in Belgrade, at a time when the US and the UK still controlled every aspect of Serbia’s government. The Bulldozer Revolution, which began as a student movement, was financed by CIA-funded foundations. In 2001 Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was secretly transported the the Hague.
His four-year trial was frequently interrupted owing to his poor health. In 2006 he was found dead of a heart attack in his cell. The International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ultimately absolved him of any war crimes in 2016 – see ICTY Exonerates Slobodan Milosevic for War Crimes
Among war crimes committed by NATO, Bosnian Muslims and Croats and Kosovo Albanians in the former Yugoslavia:
April 23, 1999 – NATO bombing of Belgrade TV station during live broadcast killing 16 journalists. The manager of the TV station Dragoljub Milanovi was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for failing to move his employees to safety prior to the bombing.In the name of “humanitarian intervention,” NATO bombing of two other TV stations, schools, power plants, churches and orchards.The arrest and torture of a Bosnian villager who spoke out against Serbian genocide by Bosnian Muslim and Croats.The expulsion of 223,000 Serbs living in the former Republic of Serbian Krajina from Croatia (supposedly under UN mandate).21 Croat massacres of Serbs under NATO supervision.Forced expulsion by Croats of newly elected president of the Republika Srbska from Sarajevo in 1992.
February 17, 2025
Trump Is Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: Federal Prisons Are Purposely Inhumane
By Akeia Lacy
Attorney General Pam Bondi issued last week several memos to all Department of Justice employees including one with the subject: “Reviving the Federal Death Penalty and Lifting the Moratorium on Federal Executions.” It detailed exactly how her agency will put into practice an executive order to restart federal executions that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.
The memo denounced the pause on federal executions under former President Joe Biden and claimed DOJ officials had neglected their jobs by upholding a moratorium on federal executions in place since 2021, which halted a killing spree launched by Trump in his first term.
“The Department’s political leadership disregarded these important responsibilities and supplanted the will of the people with their own personal beliefs,” the memo read.
While there is no evidence that the death penalty achieves its purported goal to deter crime, the Trump administration wants the federal government to direct substantial resources and dollars to carrying out more executions, more quickly. Through its executive actions and policy memos, the administration is also stating something that criminal justice and human rights advocates have long said: that conditions in many federal detention facilities are inhumane, and Trump wants to keep them that way.
In the January 20 executive order, Trump directed his attorney general to evaluate the conditions of confinement for the 37 people commuted from federal death row at the end of Biden’s term and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
The message is a direction to the federal government to use conditions of confinement as additional punishment — which is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, according to Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor of law at Yale University and a former federal public defender.
On top of that, it suggests that inhumane conditions in federal detention are the administration’s goal.
“The one thing that was clear from the order was that it sounded like the administration was going to try to influence placement of people, and try to do so under conditions that they called ‘monstrous’ in their order,” Gohara told The Intercept. Gohara spent over a decade representing clients sentenced to death in post-conviction litigation.
“Certainly, if I were leading the [Bureau of Prisons] or if I were working in the BOP, I wouldn’t want to suggest that there are any monstrous conditions in my facilities,” she said.
“That suggests that they’re actually encouraging the Bureau of Prisons to maintain monstrous conditions, or that they think they’re already monstrous conditions in the BOP somewhere, and that somebody could be put there. Which again, seems like a very odd thing for the executive to be saying about one of his agencies.”
The administration’s use of language describing federal detention as “monstrous” is on par with how Trump has spoken on criminal justice from the start, said death row attorney Dale Baich. He previously led the unit of the Arizona Federal Defender’s Office that represents people sentenced to death in post-conviction proceedings.
“I was really taken aback by the number of adjectives in the order,” Baich said. “But, you know, that’s how he campaigned, that’s how Project 2025 was drafted. We really shouldn’t be surprised.”
Incarcerated people and advocates for reform have long argued that conditions of incarceration across the board — from federal prisons to local jails — are inhumane and that the government has not done enough to address them. Even prior to the latest order, there are plenty of examples of detention facilities that have not taken corrective measures even under court order.
Welcoming and embracing inhumane conditions in prisons as federal policy will make challenging those conditions even more difficult, Baich said.
“It’s hard enough to challenge conditions of confinement when departments of corrections or the Bureau of Prisons is saying that it’s not unconstitutional,” he said.
“So I just think it’s going to be a real heavy lift going forward to challenge those conditions,” Baich said.
But challenges, he said, must continue.
“What is important is to continue to pursue unconstitutional conditions of confinement and hold the government accountable.”
Bondi’s memo last week also directs Bureau of Prisons employees to work with states that allow executions to ensure they have “sufficient supplies and resources to impose the death penalty” — including lethal injection drugs — and helping to transfer federal detainees “to the appropriate authorities to carry out those sentences.”
The order also directs the U.S. attorney general to look for opportunities to bring state capital charges against those with commuted federal death sentences and make relevant recommendations to state and local authorities, effectively finding another way to execute them. At its worst, that could look like the Department of Justice finding a way to federalize crimes in states without the death penalty — in other words, making a new constituency of suspects eligible for federal execution, Baich said.
States that don’t have the death penalty or only rarely use it are already bracing for how, if at all, Trump’s order might affect them. On Wednesday, Trump said judicial efforts to push back on his orders amounted to a “weaponization” of the courts.
Since Trump won the presidential election, at least one Democratic governor has already taken steps to downplay the state’s history of botched executions. In late November, Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs fired an independent commissioner before they were set to publish a report on their investigation into the state’s history of botched lethal injections. A draft of the report, which was never published, concluded that death by firing squad, barred in Arizona, was the only form of execution more quick and less painful than lethal injection. Arizona’s next execution, the first in two years, is scheduled for March 19.
Capital trials are expensive and resource-intensive, and it’s an open question whether the Trump administration would provide grants or additional support to rural counties that historically don’t have the capacity to carry out capital trials or executions. In a worst-case scenario, the administration could find a way to offer money to rural counties that often can’t afford to prosecute death penalty cases.
Trump’s Justice Department has already authorized the movement of one person to ensure their execution. On Wednesday, Bondi approved Oklahoma’s request to transfer George Hanson to the state from Louisiana for execution. Hanson was previously scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma in 2022, but Biden’s DOJ denied Oklahoma’s request to transfer him from Louisiana, where he is serving a life sentence for an unrelated conviction.
Baich called the move an “example of this newly found cooperation between DOJ and the states.”
“Mr. Hanson was never going to get out of prison,” Baich said. “Deliberate decisions by government officials have deprived Mr. Hanson of the guarantees of due process. This trampling of constitutional protections and the rush to execute are consistent with what we saw at the end of the first Trump administration where thirteen people were executed.”
The Trump administration’s focus on accelerating federal executions takes away resources from the goals it claims to prioritize, Gohara said during a briefing on the order last month. Those stated goals include things like helping victims and curbing crime — at a time of historically low national rates.
“We now understand that the death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources that actually could be used to help keep people free from crime and violence,” Gohara said. “If you’re spending money on expensive capital trials, you’re not spending money on doing things like using rape kits to clear old cases or to try to solve cold crimes.
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Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-federal-prisons-purposely-inhumane/5880113
The RFK Confirmation Hearings and the Dog(s) That Didn’t Bark
Ron Unz
Senate Silent on RFK Jr’s Controversial Views on Sirhan Sirhan and HIV
Ironies abounded in that narrow 52-48 vote, which was almost exactly along party lines, with every Democrat in opposition and all but one Republican in support.
Not only had Kennedy spent almost his entire life as a liberal Democrat, but he was the scion of that party’s most famous political dynasty, nephew of the martyred President John F. Kennedy and son of his brother Robert, who would have also probably reached the White House in 1968 if he had not been cut down by an assassin’s bullet.
The younger Kennedy had followed in their illustrious footsteps, spending nearly his entire life as a high-profile environmental activist, so well regarded in Democratic Party circles that President Barack Obama had considered naming him to the Cabinet in 2008. But in recent years, Kennedy’s views on public health issues had caused him to fall from grace in his own ideological camp. His strident skepticism regarding the safety of vaccines in general and the Covid vaccine in particular outraged the mainstream liberal establishment, as did his loud denunciation of the lockdowns and other controversial public health measures undertaken to control the spread of that dangerous disease.
This sharp ideological rupture eventually propelled him to challenge the renomination of President Joseph Biden in the Democratic primaries, then to launch an independent run for the White House, and ultimately to drop out and endorse Donald Trump in that race. Following Trump’s victory, the president-elect named Kennedy as his choice to lead HHS, with the former Democrat proclaiming his intent to “Make America Healthy Again.” Last week’s Senate vote has now given Kennedy the authority to set our national public health policies.
Over the years, Kennedy had become a very sharp critic of both the pharmaceutical and the food industries, so having him in control of the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA represented the worst nightmare of those powerful corporations. Therefore, they naturally mobilized their army of lobbyists and opposition researchers to assist their media and political allies in derailing his nomination.
Along with Tulsi Gabbard, nominated as Director of National Intelligence, Kennedy had probably ranked as Trump’s most controversial and bitterly opposed nominee. Indeed, the volume and vehemence of the attacks I saw against him in our leading media organs such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal may have even been greater, with those influential publications doing everything they could to endorse and amplify any harsh accusations, hoping to sway enough senators to block his appointment. He was accused of every sort of iniquity and denounced as a deranged conspiracy theorist, whose bizarre, irrational beliefs would severely endanger our nation’s public health.
Few stones were left unturned in the attacks on Kennedy’s fitness for the job, and he experienced two days of grueling testimony before the relevant Senate Committees, with the Democratic staffers having obviously strategized on the best means of defeating him before feeding the most effective attacks to their senatorial principals who grilled the nominee before the television cameras.
But one oddity I noted was that almost none of the hostile news stories nor the probing senatorial questions ever mentioned the name of “Sirhan Sirhan.” That young Palestinian had been arrested and convicted of the 1968 assassination of Kennedy’s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and there had been a multitude of supposed eyewitnesses to that crime. But in recent years Kennedy publicly declared that Sirhan was an innocent patsy, framed by the true conspirators, and called for his release from prison.
For six decades, our media has invested enormous resources in ridiculing and demonizing anyone questioning the official verdict of the 1960s Kennedy assassinations as a “conspiracy theorist,” rendering that term of abuse almost as radioactive as slurs such as “racist” or “antisemite.” Yet although Kennedy had publicly placed himself in that poisonous category, virtually none of his fierce opponents were willing to take notice of that important fact.
I think there were obvious reasons that those barking dogs kept strangely silent. Not only had the victim been Kennedy’s own father, but he had very strong evidence on his side. As even the ultra-establishmentarian Wikipedia page admits, the fatal bullet had been fired into the back of the senator’s head at point-blank range while everyone agreed that Sirhan was standing five or six feet in front of him, and this led the LA Coroner to declare that a second gunman had apparently been responsible. Sirhan’s gun only held eight rounds yet acoustical records proved that more shots had been fired. In an early 2022 article, I discussed all this evidence at considerable length, and the journalists and Democratic staffers challenging Kennedy must have realized that his case was too strong and raising it would badly backfire against them.
In any event, the question of who had assassinated Kennedy’s father in 1968 might have seemed too far removed from how he would administer America’s system of public health nearly six decades later.
However, I also noticed a far more recent and more relevant matter that had equally escaped any public scrutiny.
On two consequence days, the New York Times ran a pair of major articles summarizing the intense questioning that Kennedy endured, with each of these carrying five or six bylines and containing a number of sections highlighting all the major points raised against the nominee:
Fact-Checking Kennedy’s Health Claims in His Confirmation Hearing, January 29, 2025
Chronic DiseaseWho Covid-19 AffectsChildren’s Risk from CovidUltraprocessed Foods and ObesityMedicare and MedicaidFluoride in WaterFact-Checking Health Claims in Kennedy’s 2nd Day of Confirmation Hearings, January 30, 2025
Prioritizing chronic diseaseCovid-19 in ChildrenHepatitis B VaccinationsUse of AdderallWeight Loss DrugsCost of Childhood DiabetesHarms of Electromagnetic RadiationThese items were apparently regarded as Kennedy’s greatest vulnerabilities. But I noticed that one entire topic was totally missing from the interrogation, so I dropped a note to a highly knowledgeable journalist calling attention to that remarkable absence:
I know that you’ve been very skeptical of my support for the Duesberg Hypothesis regarding HIV/AIDS, but here’s another interesting data-point you might want to consider.
As I’m sure you’re aware, the Democrats have been mounting a ferocious all-out attack in the Senate on RFK Jr., doing everything they can to discredit him and try to block his confirmation. They have focused on every possible means of portraying him as a deluded, conspiratorial individual who holds crackpot beliefs and who must therefore be kept away from our public health system…
Don’t you find it very odd that there has been absolutely no mention of HIV/AIDS during those hearings?
After all, Kennedy published a #1 Amazon bestseller that devoted 200 pages(!) to promoting the theory that HIV was harmless and AIDS was merely a hoax.
Obviously, I wouldn’t have expected any of the senators themselves to have read his book, but surely many of their staffers did, and held strategy sessions to decide which issues to raise against Kennedy. They must have consulted scientific and medical experts to help decide where Kennedy was most vulnerable.
Isn’t it absolutely extraordinary that apparently not a single senator has brought up the Kennedy’s utterly heretical views on HIV/AIDS?
Surely this must be one of the most extreme cases of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark” on record.
The only explanation I can see is that the staffers concluded that raising the HIV/AIDS issue would be disastrously counter-productive to their efforts. This doesn’t prove that Kennedy and Duesberg are correct, but I think it means many, many very knowledgeable people fear that they might be.
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Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/rfk-jr-public-health-disasters/5880154
CDC STILL PUSHING COVID JABS on pregnant women despite 37 serious safety signals and a trail of devastation
Dr Eddy Betterman
A peer-reviewed study published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law analyzed VAERS data and identified 37 alarming safety signals linked to COVID-19 vaccines administered during pregnancy, including miscarriage, stillbirth, preeclampsia and neonatal death.The study found that adverse pregnancy outcomes were reported 69.2 times more frequently after COVID-19 vaccines compared to other vaccines, with placental insufficiency reported 499 times more frequently and neonatal breathing difficulties 134 times more frequently.The study’s authors, including obstetricians and gynecologists, urged a global halt on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, citing the lack of randomized controlled trials and the violation of the “Golden Rule of pregnancy,” which advises against introducing potentially harmful substances during fetal development.Despite protocols requiring safety signal analysis, the CDC failed to publicly flag these risks. A lawsuit forced the release of heavily redacted PRR data, raising concerns about the agency’s transparency and accountability.The CDC’s continued push for COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy, along with endorsements from major medical organizations like ACOG, has been criticized as reckless and unsupported by evidence, with accusations of prioritizing Big Pharma interests over maternal and fetal health.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has once again proven itself to be nothing more than a puppet for Big Pharma, a soulless entity willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable among us in the name of profit and population control. Despite a bombshell, peer-reviewed study revealing 37 safety signals for COVID-19 vaccines administered during pregnancy, the CDC continues to aggressively push these experimental, dangerous shots on pregnant women. This is not just negligence—it’s bioterrorism disguised as public health.
CDC ignores 37 serious safety signals for COVID vaccines in pregnancyThe study, published in the journal Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, analyzed data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and found that COVID-19 vaccines given during pregnancy are linked to horrifying outcomes, including miscarriage, preeclampsia, cervical insufficiency, chromosomal abnormalities, fetal malformations, premature birth, stillbirth, newborn asphyxia, and newborn death. These are not minor side effects—they are catastrophic, life-ending, and life-altering events that should have immediately halted the CDC’s reckless recommendations. Yet, the agency continues to double down on its deadly agenda.
The researchers used the same proportional reporting ratio (PRR) method employed by the CDC to identify safety signals. What they found was nothing short of alarming: adverse pregnancy events were reported 69.2 times more frequently after COVID-19 vaccines compared to other vaccines. Placental insufficiency, a condition that can lead to preterm birth or miscarriage, was reported 499 times more frequently after COVID-19 shots. Neonatal breathing difficulties were reported 134 times more frequently, premature infant death 124 times more frequently, and fetal cardiac arrest 108 times more frequently. These numbers are not just statistics—they represent real babies, real mothers, and real families destroyed by this unnecessary and dangerous intervention.
Researchers call for moratorium on COVID jabs during pregnancyThe researchers, including practicing obstetricians and gynecologists, concluded that an “immediate global moratorium on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is warranted.” But the CDC, in its infinite arrogance and corruption, has ignored this plea. Instead, the agency continues to peddle the lie that these vaccines are “safe and effective” for pregnant women, despite the complete lack of randomized controlled clinical trials to back up this claim.
Let’s be clear: this is a violation of the “Golden Rule of pregnancy,” which states that new and potentially harmful substances should not be introduced while a fetus is developing. Even common foods and drinks are restricted during pregnancy due to potential risks, yet the CDC has no problem injecting pregnant women with an experimental mRNA shot that has been linked to 37 adverse events and is being abandoned by institutions around the globe. This is not just incompetence—it’s criminal.
The CDC’s betrayal of pregnant women is reminiscent of past medical atrocities, such as the thalidomide and DES disasters, where recommended medications caused severe harm to pregnant women, their babies, and even their grandchildren. The COVID-19 vaccine is shaping up to be the next chapter in this dark history, and the CDC is complicit in the carnage.
What’s even more infuriating is the CDC’s blatant disregard for transparency. Despite protocols requiring the agency to conduct PRR analysis, it failed to publicly flag these safety signals. It took a lawsuit from Children’s Health Defense (CHD) to force the CDC to release its PRR data, and even then, the documents were heavily redacted. What is the CDC hiding? How many more lives must be destroyed before this agency is held accountable?
The CDC’s current recommendation, which states that pregnant women are “more likely to get very sick from COVID-19” and therefore should get vaccinated, is a manipulative scare tactic. For one, the vaccine doesn’t work. Additionally, the agency fails to mention that the risk of severe COVID-19 illness in pregnant women is already low, and the risks posed by the vaccine far outweigh any potential benefits. This is not about protecting pregnant women—it’s about pushing a depopulation agenda under the guise of public health.
Major medical organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, have blindly followed the CDC’s lead, parroting the “safe and effective” mantra without any evidence to back it up. These organizations have betrayed the very women they are supposed to protect, prioritizing their relationships with Big Pharma over the lives of mothers and babies.
The time for silence is over. The CDC’s reckless endangerment of pregnant women and their unborn children must be exposed and condemned. These vaccines are not saving lives—they are destroying them. The 37 safety signals identified in this study are a damning indictment of the CDC’s criminal negligence, and every official who continues to push these shots on pregnant women should be held accountable for their role in this ongoing tragedy.
[…]
Via https://dreddymd.com/2025/02/17/cdc-still-pushing-covid-jabs-pregnant-women/
NATO’s Nazi Roots
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The birth of NATO is often described, by bourgeois historians, as the result of the recognition that a north Atlantic defense organization was necessary in order to contain the so-called Soviet threat. What the bourgeois historians fail to mention is that the idea that an anticommunist military alliance between Western Europe and the US was so strongly supported by a major figure in German politics that NATO has sometimes been described as his brainchild. This man was Heinrich Himmler, renowned for his role as the leader of the SS and one of the main architects of the Nazi Holocaust.
The heart of the Second World War was in the East, where Hitler, with the financial backing of major Western capitalists, vowed to destroy what fourteen capitalist states had failed to eradicate in the wake of 1917: actually existing socialism. Once it became clear to Himmler that this war had failed, beginning around the time of the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, he started making secret overtures to the West in order to form an alliance that would allow them, collectively, to do what the Nazis—as well as the Japanese fascists—were incapable of doing on their own. This was appealing to sectors of the Western elite, and powerful figures in the leading imperialist countries shared Himmler’s opinion. Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, complained that his country was fighting the wrong enemy because the Nazis were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the real opponent was godless communism.
Dulles, working at the time for the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was one of Himmler’s interlocutors for the planned anticommunist north Atlantic alliance. General Karl Wolff, formerly Himmler’s right-hand man, offered Dulles, in return for postwar amnesty, to develop, with his Nazi allies, an intelligence network against Stalin. This is exactly what happened, and Dulles integrated many other Nazis and fascists into the ranks of an anticommunist international. This included the head of the Nazi intelligence service focused on the USSR, Reinhard Gehlen, who was appointed by the CIA to head West German intelligence after the war, where he proceeded to hire many of his Nazi collaborators. It also comprised, as part of Operation Sunrise in Italy, Valerio Borghese, the man known as the Black Prince and one of the major leaders of postwar fascism, who was saved from the communists by the OSS and then worked for the CIA. The Japanese official who signed the declaration of war against the US, Nobusuke Kishi, who was known as the “Devil of Shōwa” for his brutal rule of a Japanese colony in Northeast China, was also rehabilitated by the infamous Agency, which financed his rise to become the Prime Minister of Japan. These examples are only the tip of the iceberg, however, since an incalculable number of fascists were rehabilitated after the Second World War, at least 10,000 of which were brought directly to the US.
When NATO was officially established in 1949, Portugal was one of its founding members. It was a fascist dictatorship at the time, which demonstrates that NATO was, from its very founding, a military alliance of the imperialist powers—be they bourgeois democracies or fascist states—against communism, which is precisely what Himmler had had in mind. Greece joined NATO in 1953, after the communists, who had played a leading role in liberating the country from the Nazis, had lost a brutal war against their new anticommunist occupiers: the UK and the US. Having first reinstated the profascist King and then established a rightwing puppet government, the Western imperialist powers welcomed Greece into NATO once it had been remade into a reliable anticommunist client state. These patterns are visible throughout NATO’s long history, and the Ukraine is but one of the latest versions of a fascistic anticommunist client state.
West Germany joined NATO in 1955, the same year that the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany was authorized through the Paris Accords. The West German government screened volunteers and admitted 61 generals and admirals from the Nazi Wehrmacht into its new military, as well as many more at lower ranks. Among the most senior Nazi officers integrated into the West German military were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who were sworn in as its first two lieutenant generals. Speidel became “chief of the Combined Forces Department at the Ministry of Defense” and served as one of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s key military advisers (a position later occupied by Heusinger). Heusinger, whom Hitler had referred to as “my true and loyal collaborator,” became West Germany’s senior serving military officer, the equivalent of the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also served as chief of evaluation for the CIA’s Gehlen Organization, performing his task so well that the Agency “seriously considered” him for Gehlen’s position, according to internal documents. He served as a CIA agent, who “continued to consult with and confide in CIA representatives,” who reported that they “found Heusinger’s political views clearly in the interest of the U.S.” These two Nazi leaders were both promoted and became West Germany’s first four-star generals.
Both of these major Nazi officers played key roles in NATO. In 1954, Speidel was appointed as the principal “negotiator on the question of German entry into NATO.” He oversaw the integration of West Germany’s armed forces into NATO and was appointed chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe. This meant that Speidel was “the senior operational commander of all German, American, French and British divisions assigned to NATO’s Central Region.” A high-ranking Nazi official, directly involved in the genocidal war of elimination against the USSR, would thus have been the senior NATO ground commander if war broke out with the Warsaw Pact countries. Heusinger became NATO’s “senior military officer and chief military adviser to the secretary general,” serving as the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, “the highest rank in the organization’s non-civilian branch.”
Speidel and Heusinger, like many others who were integrated into NATO, had not been low-ranking Nazis. Speidel was promoted to Lieutenant general in January 1944, and he received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his service in the anti-Soviet war of elimination. Heusinger, according to US Senator Wayne Morse’s 1961 fact sheet, had become the “chief of operations on Hitler’s general staff” in 1941 and was “responsible for the military planning of all Nazi invasions from then on.” He commanded the special extermination squads (Einsatzgruppen) that were tasked with liquidating “all Jews and other groups.” Heusinger explained his view on these matters with remarkable candor: “It had always been my personal opinion that the treatment of the civilian population and the methods of anti-partisan warfare (extermination) presented the highest political and military leaders with a welcomed opportunity for carrying out their plans, namely, the systematic extermination of Slavism and Jewry.”
Speidel and Heusinger were far from the only Germans to follow the Nazi to NATO pipeline, but their leadership positions reveal how brazen NATO has been regarding its fascist ties. They were also both involved in setting up stay behind armies, which were secret fascist militias whose purported objective was originally to serve as military forces that would stay behind enemy lines to carry out acts of sabotage, espionage, exfiltration, etc. in the case of a Soviet invasion. In Germany, the Nazi colonel Albert Schnez set up a network of some 2,000 Nazi officers and 10,000 soldiers, claiming to be able to mobilize 40,000 fighters in the event of a war. They had financial backing from the business world and regularly shared intelligence with the Gehlen Organization. Gehlen himself was “the spiritual father of Stay Behind in Germany.” Schnez’s organization also had contacts with two other stay-behind Nazi networks, both of which were secretly funded by the U.S.: the Technischer Dienst (Technical Service) and the League of German Youth.
The stay behind armies that these Nazi leaders established across West Germany were part of a Western European network of sub rosa fascist militias set up by the CIA, MI6, and NATO. These organizations recruited Nazis, fascists, and other extreme rightwing anticommunists, provided them with weapons and ammunition, and fully equipped them for waging war. They were activated to commit false flag terrorist attacks, targeting the civilian population, which were blamed on communists in order to justify crackdowns and drum up support for so-called law and order governments. This anticommunist strategy of tension was extremely deadly, killing hundreds of people and injuring thousands. NATO was behind these false flag terrorist attacks, and NATO’s Nazis were—at a minimum—involved in setting up the organizations that committed them.
The well-known joke that NATO is really NAFO, the North Atlantic Fascist Organization, is no joke at all. It is a deadly serious reality, and it needs to be changed. The fight against NAFO is an essential part of the broader struggle against fascism and imperialism.
[…]
Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/natos-nazi-roots/
The Role of US-Funded Terrorists in the “New” Syria
During her confirmation hearing for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard was grilled about having been a purveyor of “Putin’s talking points” about the U.S. supporting al-Qaeda in Syria.
Of course, Gabbard responded, there can be no doubt about the veracity of such claims.
Thus, Gabbard cited the fact that the CIA, beginning under President Barack Obama, carried out its most expensive regime-change program ever in Syria, termed “Operation Timber Sycamore”—a $1 billion-a-year program which included the arming and funding of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS to undermine the government of Bashar al-Assad.
For his part, Seymour M. Hersh wrote in The New Yorker magazine in 2007 that the U.S. began supporting such groups in Syria back in 2005 under President George W. Bush.
Hersh’s article was entitled “The Redirection”–-the title referring to Bush’s having reversed course in having targeted al-Qaeda for destruction after 9/11 to supporting al-Qaeda to undermine governments, such as the one in Syria, which challenged U.S. hegemony in North Africa and West Asia.
In Syria, the U.S. has now reaped what it has sown, with the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (“HTS”)—an al-Qaeda offshoot—having come to power under the leadership of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, whose nom de guerre as al-Qaeda chief was Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
Al-Julani, which I will call him hereinafter, has just declared himself president of Syria, scrapped the socially progressive Constitution of 2012, and has announced that there will be no elections forthcoming for at least four years and possibly five.
It appears that al-Julani and his HTS terrorists need this time to purge the country of certain groups to ensure that they will be successful in any election that will take place. And, indeed, al-Julani has alluded to this fact, having stated that the current violence against certain minority groups, such as Alawites and Christians—violence he initially tried to distance himself from—is “normal and may continue for two or three years.”
The town of Homs has become an epicenter of such violence. As The Cradle explains, “the western countryside of Homs has been gripped by a brutal security campaign marked by grave human rights violations, including field executions, looting, public humiliation, sectarian insults, and indiscriminate arrests. These atrocities were carried out by the interim government’s Military Operations Department under the pretext of searching for wanted individuals and seizing weapons, but the campaign swiftly descended into lawlessness.”
According to one of my friends in Homs, “We are not happy with our lives. Our lives have been turned upside down. No work. No security. Kidnapping. Killing everywhere. The biggest problem is that what is happening is based on hatred for Alawites. We are being killed because we are Alawites.”
The new regime in Damascus has also outlawed opposition parties, such as the Baath Party (the former governing party) as well as both Communist Parties of Syria. In addition, the new government moved quickly to take away arms from individuals and groups, including the Palestinian liberation organizations which the Assad government had allowed to operate freely in Syria.
For its part, the banned Syrian Communist Party put out a statement denouncing the new regime, writing in part:
Since seizing power in our homeland Syria on December 8, 2024, as a result of a military attack fully supported by colonial powers that are members of the aggressive NATO, the dark clique has begun to restrict the social rights of the people. Tens of thousands of workers in the state and public sector facilities have been laid off, with many of these facilities being liquidated, which has led to a worsening of the economic and social situation. In addition, discrimination between citizens on the basis of their beliefs and affiliations is escalating. Kidnappings and assassinations have taken place and are taking place, accompanied by theft, looting and extortion.
I visited Syria in the latter part of January to see for myself what Syria is like under the new regime. I had something to compare this to as I had visited Syria twice back in 2021, when it was still under the leadership of Bashar al-Assad.In 2021, Syria was experiencing relative peace due to an uneasy cease-fire agreement between the Assad government and the anti-government forces allowed to continue existing and operating in the northwest province of Idlib under Turkish “protection.”
As I learned in Syria at the time, Syria’s government forces had collected passports from 84 different countries amongst the opposition fighters.
Syria had truly been the target of a world war against it—a war, combined with crippling economic sanctions, to which Syria finally succumbed at the end of 2024.
Syria is now being carved up by Western powers, with Israel taking over huge swaths of land as well as water resources in the south, including Mount Hermon—the highest point in all of the Levant. Israel is now building a military base in the south, while Turkey is building a military base in the north.
The United States, meanwhile, continues to occupy the oil- and grain-rich northeast. The new HTS regime, too busy massacring religious minorities, has not moved to contest any of these foreign encroachments. And, indeed, the Syrian Interior Ministry has released a new map of Syria which no longer includes the Golan Heights, now occupied by Israel, despite the fact that international law still recognizes this as Syrian territory. This same new map also effectively cedes territory to Turkey in the north.
I met and interviewed a number of people while in Syria. Of course, there was a diversity of opinion as there always will be in such a large and diverse society. Some people are hopeful that things will change for the better now, especially if the economic sanctions are lifted from Syria and the country is allowed to rebuild what was destroyed during the war—the prevention of such reconstruction being an intended goal of the sanctions.
Indeed, almost everyone is unanimous that they are desperate to see the sanctions lifted and for economic life to return to the country. This makes eminent sense.
The entire country remains devastated from the brutal war. The central portion of Damascus, while spared the worst of the damage, is still in bad shape, suffering as it is from dilapidated infrastructure and buildings.
Meanwhile, other towns, like Jobar which I visited, resemble the bombed-out city of Dresden after World War II. A recent report by the RAND Corporation describes the devastation which remains in Syria after the war:
Syria’s infrastructure is so deteriorated that basic services are woefully insufficient for those who are there now—much less for a large influx of returning refugees. A decade and a half of warfare has damaged 23 percent of the total housing stock, especially where the fighting was most intense, and thus where many of the refugees lived. The education system is in shambles, with 2.4 million children not attending classes and heavily damaged school infrastructure. Only slightly more than half of Syria’s hospitals are fully functioning. And in addition to the refugees outside the country, more than 7 million Syrians are internally displaced.
Meanwhile, many others in Syria are not so hopeful for the future under HTS. One Christian cleric I interviewed—an individual who is reluctant to reveal his identity—spoke for a lot of people when he told me, “before, we had a dictatorship; now, we have something worse—a government run by extremists.” He stated that, “in my opinion, the U.S. brought us HTS, and they can take them back.”
His view was that what happened with the HTS takeover of Syria could not be termed a “revolution,” for it was not an organic rising of the people. Rather, it was the triumph of a group funded and supported from the outside of Syria, made up in significant part of foreign fighters and based in only one part of the country—Idlib. This, in short, is not a group which can purport to represent the Syrian people.
This cleric, as a number of others also complained to me, was disturbed how the misdeeds of the Assad government had been exaggerated, or even falsified, to provide post hoc justifications for the takeover by HTS.
The big lie he and others pointed to was that revolving around Sednaya Prison—the main focus of the mainstream press after the fall of Assad. As he and others explained to me, the media made up grotesque falsehoods about the prison—for example, claiming that tools used in the workshop there were in fact instruments of torture.
One individual told me that they in fact knew someone who was imprisoned there—they believed quite wrongly—who was the subject of a campaign under Assad to release him. This person, upon being released, categorically denied that torture was happening in that prison.
I met another individual who is an Alawite living in Damascus. This individual, whom I will call “A” (and refer to as “they” and “their” so as not to reveal their gender), was quite afraid for their safety, and quite reasonably so.
First of all, A’s friend, a university professor, had recently been kidnapped and killed. Tim Anderson, on Twitter, described what happened to this professor:
Days after her abduction by HTS, the body of Dr. Rasha Al-Ali was discovered, bearing signs of brutal treatment, including the amputation of her fingers. Dr. Rasha, a respected university researcher and a member of the Arab Writers Union, was a prominent intellectual voice. Her crime…criticism of wearing the Niqab on campus.
Her killing underscores the growing dangers faced by academics and intellectuals in the region, as well as the alarming rise in sectarian and targeted violence. This tragic loss highlights the need for immediate attention to the safety and protection of Syria’s minority and intellectual communities.
Shortly after this incident, A barely escaped being kidnapped. Thus, A, a university instructor, was asked by a student to meet off-campus. Before this meeting happened, however, other students warned A not to go, explaining that this was a ploy to kidnap A. While A remains in Syria, they are considering leaving the country.If A flees, they will join others who have already left Syria for fear of the new government, as well as those who have been displaced within the country as a result of the fighting culminating in Assad’s overthrow.Thus, more than 100,000 Syrians (mostly Shia and members of other minority religious groups) have fled Syria since the fall of Assad, while “[o]ne million more Syrians were internally displaced by the fighting in November and December.” According to A, an entire town—the Alawite town of Alqeen, in the Daraa Province of Syria—just “disappeared” in December after the HTS takeover. According to A, the entire town was depopulated and the whereabouts of the residents are unknown. Meanwhile, despite the claims by the mainstream media that Syrians were flocking back home after the fall of Assad, only 125,000 Syrians have returned since then.Even as I was writing this article, A wrote to me about another atrocity committed by extremists linked to the new HTS government. Thus, they wrote to me about a 22-year-old woman named Nagam Issa who had been kidnapped in Homs while visiting a clinic for a pregnancy check-up. Her dead body, showing signs of torture, was later found, lying next to the body of another young woman.
The kidnapping and death of Nagam were publicized on Facebook in a post which A sent to me. According to this post, originally written in Arabic, “The primary suspect in the crime of kidnapping Mrs. ‘Nagam Issa’ is one of the terrorists and leaders of the armed sectarian factions belonging to the dirty Golani terrorist called Jassim Abu Moawya from Tklakh in the Homs countryside. This dirty sectarian terrorist continuously abducts and carries out armed attacks upon the people in the surrounding villages either to kill or to intimidate civilians, and he has documented and published these crimes. The last massacre committed by this sectarian savage was days ago….”
[…]
Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/fear-and-loathing-in-the-new-syria/
February 16, 2025
Is Our Five-Year Nightmare Finally Over?
Jeffrey A Tucker
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s confirmation as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the US is the ultimate repudiation of the Covid policy response.
The scheme of lockdown-until-vaccination was the biggest effort of government and industry on a global scale on historical record. It was all designed to transfer wealth to winning industries (pharma, online retail, streaming services, online education), divide and conquer the population, and consolidate power in the administrative state.
By 2021, RFK, Jr., had emerged as the world’s most vocal, erudite, and knowledgeable critic of the scheme. In two brilliant books – The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-Up – he documented the entire enterprise and dated the evolution of the pandemic industry from its postwar inception to the present. There was simply no way to read these books and think about the corporatist cabal in the same way.
The circumstances that led to his appointment at HHS are themselves implausible and remarkable. Perceiving President Biden to be a weak candidate – one who had forced masks and shots on the population and brutally censored tech and media – he decided to make a run for president, presuming that there would be an open primary. There wasn’t one, so he was forced into an independent run.
That effort was chewed up by the usual political dynamic that befalls every third-party effort – too many ballot-access barriers plus the usual logic of Duverger’s law. That left the campaign in a difficult spot. At the same time, two huge political shifts had become clear. The Democratic Party had become a vessel and a front mainly for the administrative state with a veneer of woke ideology, while the Republican Party was being taken over by refugees from the Democrats, in effect creating a new Trump party out of the remnants of the other two.
The rest is legendary. Trump linked up with Elon Musk to do to the federal government what he did when he took over Twitter, taking the company private, gutting the place of embedded federal assets, and firing 4 out of 5 workers. In the midst of this, and faced with a terrifying flurry of legal attacks, Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet. That triggered terrible memories of RFK, Jr.’s father and uncle, and thus sparked discussions about coming together.
Within a matter of weeks, we had a new coalition that brought together old antagonists, as many people and groups seemingly in the same instant realized their conjoined interests in cleaning up the corporatist cartel. With the newly freed platform of X to reach the public, MAGA/MAHA/DOGE was born.
Trump won and chose RFK, Jr., to lead the most powerful public health agency in the world. The barrier was Senate confirmation, but that was achieved through some incredible triangulation that made it extremely difficult to vote no.
In the big picture, you can measure the size of this titanic shift in American politics by the way the votes in the Senate lined up. All Republicans but one voted for the most prominent scion of the Democratic Party to head the health empire while all Democrats voted no. That alone is striking, and a testament to the power of the pharma lobby, which, during the hearings, was exposed as the hidden hand behind the most passionate opponents of the confirmation.
Is our nightmare over? Not yet. Writing not even a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump, it is still unclear just how much authority he truly exercises over the sprawling executive branch. For that matter, no one can even agree on how large this branch is: between 2.2 million and 3 million employees and somewhere between 400 and 450 agencies. The financial bleed in this realm is unthinkable and far worse than even the biggest cynic can imagine.
Five former secretaries of the Treasury took to the pages of the New York Times with a shocking claim. “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.” This has included a career employee called “fiscal assistant secretary—a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.”
There is no reason even to read between the lines. What this means is that no person voted into office by the people and no one appointed by such a person has access to the federal books since 1946. This is startling beyond belief. No owner of any company would ever tolerate being barred from the accounting offices and payment systems. And no company can offer any public stock without independent audits and open books.
And yet almost 80 years have gone by during which time neither has been true for this gigantic enterprise called the federal government. That means that $193 trillion has been spent by an institution that has never faced granulated oversight from the people and never met the normal demands that every enterprise faces every day.
The usual habit in Washington has been to treat every elected leader and their appointments as temporary and transitory marionettes, people who come and go and disturb little to nothing about the normal operations of government. This new administration seems to have every intention to change that but the job is inconceivably challenging. As much public support as MAGA/MAHA/DOGE enjoy for now, and as many people from those groups are getting embedded in the power structure, they are outnumbered and outmaneuvered by millions of agents of the old order.
This transition will not be easy if it happens at all.
The inertia of the old order is mighty. Even on the issue of health and pandemics, there is already confusion. CBS News has reported that Fauci-loyalist and mRNA pusher Gerald Parker will head the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response or OPPR. The report cited only unnamed “health officials” and the appointment has been celebrated by Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer board member who nudged Trump into backing lockdowns in 2020.
All the while, this appointment has not been confirmed by the White House. We do not know if OPPR, created by Congressional charter, will even be funded. The reporter will not reveal his sources – raising the question of why any appointment having to do with health should be surrounded by such cloak-and-dagger machinations.
If Dr. Parker becomes ensconced in this position and another health emergency is declared, this time for Bird flu, HHS and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will not be in any kind of decision-making position at all.
The larger problems have to do with a broader question: is the president really in charge of the executive branch? Can he hire and fire? Can he spend money or decline to spend money? Can he set policy for the agencies?
One might suppose that the whole answer to these questions can be found in Article 2, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” And yet that sentence was written almost 100 years before Congress created this thing called the “civil service” that nowhere appears in the Constitution. This fourth branch has grown in size and power to swamp both the presidency and the legislature.
Courts are going to have to sort this out, and already an avalanche of lawsuits has hit the new administration for daring to presume control over agencies and their activities of which the president is and must necessarily be held accountable. Lower federal courts seem to be demanding that the president be that in name only, while the Supreme Court might have a different opinion.
The much-ballyhooed “constitutional crisis” consists of nothing other than an attempt to reassert the original constitutional design of government.
This is the background template in which RFK, Jr., takes power at HHS, and oversees all the sub-agencies. These agencies played a huge role in covering for the attack on liberty and rights over five years. His confirmation is a symbolic repudiation of the most egregious public policies on record. And yet, the repudiation is entirely implicit: there has been no commission, no admission of error, no one truly held responsible, and no real accountability.
[…]
Via https://brownstone.org/articles/is-our-five-year-nightmare-finally-over/
China’s DeepSeek Bombshell Rocks Trump’s $500B AI Boondoggle
Mike Whitney
The future of humanity is being decided as we speak. And it is not being decided on a battlefield in Eastern Europe, or the Middle East or the Taiwan Strait, but in the data centers and research facilities where technology experts create “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of Artificial Intelligence.” This is a full-blown, scorched-earth free-for-all that has already racked up a number of casualties though you wouldn’t know it from reading the headlines which typically ignore recent ‘cataclysmic’ developments. But when President Trump announced the launching of a $500 billion AI infrastructure project (Stargate) on Tuesday just hours after China had released its DeepSeek R1—which “outperforms its rivals in advanced coding, math, and general knowledge capabilities”—it became painfully obvious that the battle for the future ‘is on’ in a big way. And this is not a battle that either side can afford to lose. Here’s how technology expert Adam Button summed it up:
Imagine we’re back in 2017 and the iPhone X was just released. It was selling $999 and Apple was crushing sales and building a wide moat around its ecosystem.
Now imagine, just days later, another company introduced a phone and platform that was equal in every way if not better and the price was just $30.
That’s what unfolded in the AI space today. China’s DeepSeek released an opensource model that works on par with OpenAI’s latest models but costs a tiny fraction to operate. Moreover, you can even download it and run it free (or the cost of your electricity) for yourself.
The product is a huge leap in terms of scaling and efficiency and may upend expectations of how much power and compute will be needed to manage the AI revolution. It also comes just hours before Trump is expected to unveil a $100 billion investment in US datacenters. The model shows there are different ways to train foundational AI models that offer up the same results with much less cost. It also opens up far more applications for AI that would have been too expensive to run previously, which should broaden the applications in the real economy. China’s DeepSeek may have just upended the economics of AI, forex live
Imagine the panic that is spreading across western tech capitals right now. AI was supposed to be the fast-track to absolute societal control and oligarchic rule into the next millennia, but now those pesky Chinese have overturned the applecart leaving western elites with a problem they might not be able to fix. (See—Unchecked AI will lead us to a police state, edri ) They expected that their microchip sanctions would sabotage China’s AI efforts for at least a decade-or-so but, instead, China has come roaring back with a system that has left the tech giants gasping for air.
Of course, China’s eye-popping strides in technological development are nothing new as editor Ron Unz pointed out in a recent article where he noted that “between 2003 and 2007, the US led in 60 of the 64 technologies.” Whereas, as of 2022, “China led in 52 of the 64 technologies.” That’s not a competition; that’s a beat-down in a parking lot. Here’s Unz:
China now leads the world in many of the most important future technologies. The success of its commercial companies in telecommunications (Huawei, Zongxin), EV (BYD, Geely, Great Wall, etc.), battery (CATL, BYD) and Photovoltaics (Tongwei Solar, JA, Aiko, etc.) are directly built on such R&D prowess.
Similarly, the Chinese military’s modernization is built on the massive technological development of the country’s scientific community and its industrial base…. With its lead in science and technology research, China is positioned to outcompete the US in both economic and military arenas in the coming years…. American Pravda: China vs. America, Ron Unz, Unz Review
None of this should come as a surprise, although the timing of DeepSeek’s release (preempting Trump’s Stargate announcement) shows that the Chinese don’t mind throwing a wrench in Washington’s global strategy if it serves their regional interests, which it undoubtedly does. Here’s a bit more background from an article by Benj Edwards at Ars Technica:
On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI’s o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks….
The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI’s o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. …
The R1 model works differently from typical large language models ….They attempt to simulate a human-like chain of thought as the model works through a solution to the query. This class of what one might call “simulated reasoning” models, or SR models for short, emerged when OpenAI debuted its o1 model family in September 2024. …
DeepSeek reports that R1 outperformed OpenAI’s o1 on several benchmarks and tests, including AIME (a mathematical reasoning test), MATH-500 (a collection of word problems), and SWE-bench Verified (a programming assessment tool)….
TechCrunch reports that three Chinese labs—DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi—have now released models they say match OpenAI’s o1’s capabilities, with DeepSeek first previewing R1 in November. Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download, ars technica
This is a very big deal. The United States intends to dominate the world in this critical technology and yet the upstart Chinese have not only produced a system that is every bit as good as America’s best, but have made it more affordable, more accessible and more transparent. What’s not to like?
[…]
Here’s more from political analyst Arnaud Bertrand in a post on X:
Most people probably don’t realize how bad the news (about) China’s Deepseek is for OpenAI. They’ve come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they’re charging just 3% of the price. It’s essentially as if someone had released a mobile on par with the iPhone but was selling it for $30 instead of $1000. It’s this dramatic.
What’s more, they’re releasing it open-source so you even have the option – which OpenAI doesn’t offer – of not using their API at all and running the model for “free” yourself.
If you’re an OpenAI customer today you’re obviously going to start asking yourself some questions, like “wait, why exactly should I be paying 30X more?”. This is pretty transformational stuff, it fundamentally challenges the economics of the market….
So basically, it looks like the game has changed. All thanks to a Chinese company that just demonstrated how U.S. tech restrictions can backfire spectacularly – by forcing them to build more efficient solutions that they’re now sharing with the world at 3% of OpenAI’s prices. As the saying goes, sometimes pressure creates diamonds. @RnaudBertrand
Get the picture? Everything the US has done to stymie China’s development—including economic sanctions, chips embargoes, military provocations, political meddling, even arresting a Huawei executive (truly pathetic)—has blown up in their faces. China’s well-educated, highly motivated, technologically adept workforce have produced a model of AI that equals or exceeds the best the West has to offer at a fraction of the cost and with open sourcing that allows users to modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.
So, which version of AI sounds like a genuine benefit to humankind and which sounds like another scheme for transforming the world into a dystopian police-state controlled by aspiring tyrants and psychopathic control freaks?
[…]So, it’s basically like everything else in this sick, twisted world where a handful of money-grubbing miscreants muscle their way into a new technology so they can fatten their own bank accounts while planting their bootheel firmly on the neck of humanity. It seems to me that China’s approach is vastly superior in that it’s clearly aimed at providing the benefits of AI to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost. Here are a few random comments on China’s DeepSeek AI that I picked off X that show how excited people are about this groundbreaking version:
The ramifications of this are huge. Every day China does something incredible, totally unlike the stagnation of the EU, talking all day while accomplishing nothing, or the latest evil plan oozing out of DC. This is just brilliant. & inspiring. & it WILL earn them more goodwill @CaptainCrusty66
It’s the china recipe book for success for every industry where western oligopolies have dominated. @bbooker450
AI will become a part of everyday infrastructure like electricity and tap water. DeepSeek is a signficant step towards that, thanks to its cost reduction and open source nature @MrBig2024
We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all…. @DrJimFan
This is cool…this isn’t just another open source LLM release. this is o1-level reasoning capabilities that you can run locally, that you can modify and that you can study…
that’s a very different world than the one we were in yesterday. Al, comments line
Price comparison of OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek AI R1: R1 is significantly cheaper across all categories (96–98% savings). Now you know why big organizations don’t want open-source to continue, If humanity is ever going to benefit from AI, it will be from open-source . @ai_for_success
China is overturning mainstream development theory in astonishing ways. China’s GDP per capita is only $12,000. That’s 70% less than the average in high-income countries. And yet they have the largest high-speed rail network in the world. They’ve developed their own commercial aircraft. They are the world leaders in renewable energy technology and electric vehicles. They have advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, aerospace engineering… China has a higher life expectancy than the USA, with 80% less income. We were told that this kind of development required very high levels of GDP/cap. But over the past 10 years China has demonstrated that it can be achieved with much more modest levels of output. How do they do it? By using public finance and industrial policy to steer investment and production toward social objectives and national development needs. This allows them to convert aggregate production into development outcomes much more efficiently than other countries, where productive capacity is often wasted on activities that may be highly profitable to capital, or beneficial to the rich, but may not actually advance development. Of course, China still has development gaps that need to be addressed. And we know from some other countries that higher social indicators can be achieved with China’s level of GDP/cap, by focusing more on social policy. But the achievements are undeniable, and development economists are taking stock. @jasonhickel
JULIAN ASSANGE says ‘Artificial intelligence is being used for mass assassinations in Gaza’ …“The majority of targets in Gaza are bombed as a result of artificial intelligence targeting.” ..It has been revealed that Google provided the Israeli military with AI tools in the early weeks of the genocide.
Unfortunately, the intensity of the competition between the US and China, ignores the inherent risks of Artificial Intelligence and its looming threat to human survival. In a recent analytical piece by the Rand Corporation titled AI and Geopolitics: How Might AI Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations?, the authors provide a disturbing window into a future in which “AI-enabled machines—of equivalent or greater intelligence and, potentially, highly disruptive capabilities” could pose a threat to our own existence. Keep in mind, the line between our historic reality and science fiction has already been crossed just as the probability that our own creation, AI, is likely “to become an actor, not just a factor” in the existential challenges faced by our species.
[…]
Via https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/chinas-deepseek-bombshell-rocks-trumps-500b-ai-boondoggle/#new_comments
The Most Revolutionary Act
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